from
 REASON GIVEN
Greg Spatz

I knew the subjects she was studying from the books I saw heaped in her knapsack—a purple-black pseudo-mountaineer thing with snaps and buckles and draw cords, nothing chic or urban like what most of the girls that year preferred. Often the draw at the top would be left open and I’d get a glimpse inside—worn spines, paint chipping, cardboard fraying: economics, sociology, psychology, western civ., and the single blue multi-subject spiral-bound notebook she kept her notes in. Too, sometimes we talked about it. And once or twice I helped myself. Anyone would have, though, given the circumstances. There I’d be, in the back store room, on my way from having a smoke outside and stopping to pick up a tin of olives or crushed tomato or some fresh onions, and I’d see it: her bag on the counter, the white embroidered wool jacket she wore on warmer days casually spread atop, inviting me in almost, you might say.

Her note taking was all done with pencil, in a faint slanted scrawl, the letters lean, flat and spaced tightly, and the numbers sometimes embellished with curlicues at the tops. Nothing she wrote ever seemed finished or fully formulated. An idea begun, heading introduced with underlining—CHILD’S EARLIEST RECOLLEACTION AT THE HANDS OF MATERNALL FIGURE, or LATENT OEDIPUL, or simply BONAPARTE—then carried a step or two further and dropped. Drawings, too, in the margins, some of an angel-seeming girl, like her, studying, others of flowers and swings, and some indecipherable scribbly shapes. None of them finished. Once, on torn out sheets of paper, part of a letter written to her mother rambling on about swimming in Lake Tahoe and how much she missed Noreen and something she wished for Raoul. All of her notebook pages smelled of her soap but did not appear pored over or thumb stained or crinkled from late night hours of studying. They felt discarded. Thrown off. Nothing important. Already I had my suspicions.